Legit work-from-home jobs

At the risk of outing myself, I employ roughly a dozen part-time journalists in a work-from-home contracting gig and am looking for more. Because of time deadlines, the work seems to be easier for west coast writers than people on the East Coast.

People last week made between $25 and $400, depending on how much work they signed up for.

If you want more info, PM me.

 

Necrobump!

I stumbled across Mechanical Turk this week and have been doing it for a few days. It's a lot of fun, but I do *not* recommend it for anyone looking for a real work-from-home job.

The negatives:

1) The pay is completely terrible. I did the math, and at my absolute best I can make about $4/hour on the site, and practically most people will make a lot less.

2) There are some horror stories out there about people randomly running afoul of the Amazon.com Terms of Service, and if they close your account for TOS reasons, any money you haven't cashed out, they keep. This isn't like real freelance work where you have some labor law recourse. It *seems* as if most of those people actually were trying to cheat (i.e. by having computers do the work for them or having multiple accounts or fake identities), but that still rubs me the wrong way.

So why have I been enjoying it? I realized today that it's hitting the same part of my brain as a good video game. You do some simple tasks over and over and your score goes up. Only in this case, your score is measured in dollars.

Essentially, you sign up for the site, and there are thousands of small tasks people need performed, with small prices attached. Once you are approved on the site, you can begin doing those tasks. You submit the work, and wait for the requester to approve your work (takes between minutes and 30 days, with about half done inside a day). The requester has a lot of leeway to reject you for any reason, but so far I've had no problems. After you've been doing it for 10 days, you can have whatever amount you've accumulated direct deposited to your bank account any time you want.

Most of the money I've made has come from transcription jobs. There are a few companies out there that offer transcription services for something like $1/minute of audio. Then they the file into 3-5 minute chunks and pay Mechanical Turk workers a fraction what they charged in order to do the actual work. They demand perfect accuracy and devotion to house style. Obviously, a reporting background is good practice for this.

The best-paying transcription jobs are verbatim transcripts of insurance claim phone calls. You have to pass a test to do these, and they expect every small stutter and "um" to be in the transcript. I've also done church services, an interview with a firefighter who survived 9/11 and a Chicago Buddhist conference session.

There are a decent number of writing jobs, and those are some of the best paying on the site, but I've stayed away from those. The pay is completely awful by real-world standards, and any professional should just do real freelance work if they want to do extra writing. I did make $1.50 for writing a 200-word description of a neighborhood in San Francisco to use with real estate ads.

The video-game mentality comes into play in that I've found myself doing stuff for almost no pay at all, just because I want to see my statistics go up or my "score" improve. Some of the stuff I've done and for some reason enjoyed doing:

1) A few surveys for academic studies (not bad pay, ranging from 50 cents to $3)
2) Entered the data off of business cards at .02 per card (takes about 30 seconds each).
3) Google searched given terms and entered where a given web site showed up in the search rankings (about 3 cents per term)
4) Judged the performance of automated answering services on phone calls with human inquiries. (7 cents per call)
5) Written 90-character descriptions of porn videos based on a series of still photos. (9 cents each, but I would have done that one for free)
6) Confirmed whether snippets of text from what appeared to be data sniffers referred to a company or not (I.e. did the sentence refer to farmers or Farmers Insurance)? $.05 per batch of 10.

I'm sure I'll get bored with it in a week or so, but I'll report back to mention if I ever see any of the $40 I've made so far.

 

I'm in government sales and I work from home... I had to work in an office for 18 months before I was allowed to do that, but it's pretty awesome.

 

Maybe not quite the same thing, but you can also sell a product from your car.

 

I have a step-daughter who does e-mail customer support for a large company that manufactures printers, among other things. She works from her home office from something like 3:30 a.m. until noon. I think she has to work out of the main office one day every two weeks for some reason (meetings?), but on those days, she goes in at a more-normal time.

My step-son's wife also works from home 100% of the time. She is a graphic designer for a company that designs manuals for the military. She messaged me recently that they were looking for a contract editor for the text part, and I was able to send several current and past co-workers her way as candidates.

 

Streaming model for a gay porn site?

 

Selling drugs is a good option.
You might have to work on location until you get an established customer base.

 

As an update, I got about $200 in direct deposits from Mechanical Turk this week.

I can make about $4 or $5/hour at this point just sitting at home farting around on the computer, which I was going to be doing anyway. Mostly doing audio transcription and taking surveys for academic studies.

Worth looking into if anyone has some spare time and wants spare cash without going through the trouble of a formal second job.

 

Bumping this back up, I've been doing some work for Textbroker.com. It's one of those content mills for writing.

So far, I've made about $35, doing about 4 hours worth of work. Not great, byany means, but I don't have very high expectations for this.

Basically, they take just about anyone, and they rate you on a scale of 1 (practically illiterate) to 5 (brilliant) on a brief writing sample. Then they re-evaluate you after your first five articles. I started out as a 4 (making 1.4 cents per word), but they bumped me down to a 3 (a penny per word) after my first five articles. I've gotten pretty good ratings from clients, so maybe I'll get bumped back up to 4. Supposedly, it's very hard to become a 5. Most of the articles are for people ranked 4 or 5, so it's not that easy to find stuff if you are a 3.

The articles are what they are. Some weird stuff, some stuff on foreign movies, the occasional foreign porn site (I don't do those, I don't want to be accused of helping traffic 10-year-old girls of course), some stuff to publicize companies. I mostly look for the quick 200-300 word fluff to make a couple of dollars.

Basically, I treat it as something to do if I have a spare 15-20 minutes to make a couple of dollars. I've found it better than a few other sites, that either have little work, even shittier pay (like $3 for 1,000 words), or ridiculous requirements. It's something you can do at any time of day or night.

 

But, you'll take money from people who do publish "articles" like that?

Doesn't sound like you're "giving back" to your community Baron.

 

You rang?